New fiction

Voyage of hope and despair

MICHAEL ARDITTI'S fifth novel is a fine example of how resonant fiction based on real events can be. Through the memoir of Karl Frankel-Hirsch, the 15-year-old heir to a department-store fortune, the author tells the true story of the St Louis, a German liner that left Hamburg in May 1939 carrying 900 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany after years of persecution and the terror of Kristallnacht.

Bound for Cuba, where the refugees were to await their entry permits into the United States, the St Louis became a pawn in a political power game. Cuba reneged on its promise to allow the refugees entry; President Roosevelt ignored pleas for them to be let into America; and after nearly four weeks at sea the ship was forced to turn back to Europe. Some of its passengers (including an eight-year-old girl who came to live with this reviewer's grandparents) were offered asylum in Britain, but many were condemned to die in the Holocaust.

Mr Arditti has written sensitively about many weighty issues—betrayal, fanaticism, faith—in his previous books. Once again he treats his subjects with empathy, neither trivialising their horror nor glamorising their plight for fictional benefit. His skill lies in weaving the experiences of the fictional Karl and his family into accurately re-told historical events—a burial at sea, a flawed mutiny, an attempted suicide—all featuring true-life characters. There is the evil Otto Schiendick, the Nazi party's representative on board; Manuel Benitez, the venal Cuban director of immigration; and Max Loewe who, overcome with fear of returning to Germany, slit his wrists and threw himself overboard.

But it is the voice of Karl, whose raw adolescent energy leaps from the pages, that gives “A Sea Change” its compelling realism. Through Karl, the author portrays the barbarity of the Nazis, the terror of persecution, and the despair that floods the ship when it is turned away from Havana, the city's “ribbon of lights promising a warmth and a welcome that would never be ours.” Paralleling the story of the St Louis is Karl's own voyage of discovery in which he falls in love for the first time and, in the face of hardship, becomes a man.

“A Sea Change” is a powerful novel of courage in the face of betrayal. But Mr Arditti's book is also a tribute to the passengers who sailed on the St Louis in search of freedom, and an elegant memorial to those sent back to Europe to face death at the hands of the Nazis.